Cheap Digital Arty Facts, or, CRAPPY DIGITAL CAMERAS

[OtherMichael]

Continuing the discussion from Help me pick a dumbphone:

@jerwin

I thought Holgas were medium format, and thus all the resolution rights and privileges thereof.

Holga

cheap construction, cheap lens. It doesn’t matter if you’ve got a bazillion megapixels if your lens is frosted. You need a decent combination of the two.

 

Actually, with a bazillion megapixels you might be able to, with the right algorithm…

Here’s a shot I made 10 years ago with a crappy digicam; it was modified in photoshop only to the extent of bringing up the colors (uh, that would be… crap. can’t remember. No pseudo-colors were involved. Light levels? Sometihng like that). The thing I really liked about this camera is in low-light situations it wouldn’t give you a quick, dark photo - it would keep exposing until there was “enough”. Meaning you had long-exposures. If I ever used a tripod it might have been something! But it was tiny, had no mount, and I loved the blurriness better.

 

Here’s one in daylight that demonstrates lens issues - see the corners:

---

I should move these photos over to flickr. They can be found at http://www.xradiograph.com/snapshots/snapshots.08.htm - which is an admixture of all types of photos I did then. Back when I thought I had the time to manually build a website by hand. ::shudder::

Gosh, looks like that was only about a span of 2 years. Hunh. Burnout.
I have a ton of photos on my (old) computer that I never uploaded to flickr, which came after this.

[jerwin]

Perhaps this is not the best time for me to speak of the joys of using a bad lens-- I just bought a 40mm macro lens with all the latest tech from NIkkor.

I did have a 300mm f4.5 prime that I bought (by mistake, as it eventually turned out) on ebay. The condition turned out to be horrible, and there was very little contrast. I think some of the internal elements are scratched or coated with oils of various kinds (the focus was extremely stiff and therefore innacurate). I tried opening up the lens, but, managed to strip the screws. I had planned to use it in conjnction with a hand meter. No, I know that it is a cursed lens.